Skies of Fury DX Review

Soaring through the skies in an old-school fighter plane while shooting down enemies is so much fun. Thankfully, Skies of Fury DX provides enjoyable dogfights that you can experience in your living room or on the go. So, let's take off!

The sky would be pretty peaceful if we didn't have to muck it up

Skies of Fury DX has you pilot a fighter plane within a succession of missions that involve accomplishing tasks such as defeating every enemy plane and flying through rings. It's an incredibly simple setup but the gameplay itself is very enjoyable. This is partly due to the intuitive controls that anyone can effortlessly learn. Using a combination of both sticks, you can adjust the throttle to move slower or faster as well as yaw, pitch, and roll. Tapping the directional buttons allows you to perform aerial manoeuvres that help with evading enemy fire. Speaking of which, if you ever lose sight of your opponents then you can use camera targeting which temporarily adjusts the camera to focus on nearby foes. As you shoot, you'll acquire energy that you can unleash in order to become more powerful for a short amount of time and you also have the ability to summon your allies to fly in tandem with you. Simply put, it's fun stuff.

On a visual level, Skies of Fury DX looks fantastic with stylish environments and plenty of appealing plane models. One cool effect is that you can fly within clouds in order to hide from enemies. Flying through the unique environments with gorgeous colour schemes adds a great deal of immersion to the overall experience and the audio is spot-on, too. You'll hear plenty of orchestral pieces that help the combat feel epic while the sound effects of gunfire and distant explosions make shooting down enemies all the more satisfying.

This plane is making me hungry...

As you progress through the campaign, your pilot will level up which might unlock a new plane and allows you to spend upgrade points on various attributes. You'll also earn lots of loot boxes that mostly contain plane skins. However, opening those suckers one at a time is so tedious that I eventually stopped caring altogether. Anyway, the campaign takes place during World War I and contains 5 chapters with 20 missions in each. 10 of them must be played with a British pilot and the other 10 have you control a German pilot. However, it's very strange that you have to complete each chapter with both pilots. Why can't I just focus on one of them? It makes no sense.

Even though the campaign is impressively lengthy, there are a couple of other modes, too, in the form of Survival and Versus. Each can be played with up to four simultaneous local players which is great if you have a few friends who also enjoy these kinds of games.

Skies of Fury DX may be a fun game but it does have a couple downsides. For starters, the missions become far too repetitive early on in the campaign. After flying through rings and shooting down enemy planes dozens of times, you'll desperately want to see something different. Also, the flying and combat is solid and easy to learn but it doesn't quite feel visceral enough. In other words, I wish there were more visual effects to help highlight the exchange of gunfire because as it is, the combat here comes across as sanitized.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... wait, it is a plane...

I enjoyed my time with Skies of Fury DX and will pick it up whenever I'm in the mood for some arcade-style dogfight action. In the end, I'm looking forward to seeing what the developers come up with next.